Pollution: Group Urges Tinubu to Halt Environmental Degradation in Niger Delta

President Bola Tinubu has been urged to personally visit the Niger Delta region in order to have firsthand information on the devastating effect of oil spillages in the region.

Addressing a press conference on the cleaning up of the Niger Delta and resolving the prevailing environmental genocide yesterday in Abuja, a coalition of civil society organisations and stakeholders, Coalition for a Cleaned Niger Delta (CCND), claimed that a billion litres of crude oil equivalent have been released into the Niger Delta ecosystem as the price paid by communities in the area for Nigeria’s oil production.

The team which was led by Executive Director, Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), Nnimmo Bassey, and Founding Executive Director, African Centre for Leadership, Strategy & Development (Centre LSD), Otive Igbuzor, said: “We trust our President is well aware that the ecosystem of the Niger Delta has for about 70 years been plagued by unprecedented perennial pollution from petroleum production activities, enabled or worsened by a highly dysfunctional, conflicted and compromised environmental regulatory system, since the country struck commercial oil in the Oloibiri Province prior to Nigeria’s Independence. This festering devastation has projected and ranked Nigeria’s Niger Delta among the worst oil and gas polluted regions in the world.

“By the very limited official records of Nigeria’s spill detection body (National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency – NOSDRA), there were 16,263 oil spills within the 17-year period of 2006 to 2023.

“This accounted for about 823,483 barrels of oil spilt, equivalent to 4,103 tanker trucks or 130,933,797 litres of crude oil, from NOSDRA data.

“These figures are a fractional slice of the reality, as they exclude 5,456 spills for which the spiller companies did not provide NOSDRA with estimates of spilled quantities. Besides, estimates are usually and “understandably” grossly suppressed by operators. Data for some mega spills, like the Aiteo blowout at OML 29 that lasted for 38 days in November-December 2021, are also omitted.